With each passing day, the need arises to stay relevant to the technology-driven and highly competitive business environment. Organizations need a flexible and robust Information Technology (IT) infrastructure that enables them to predict and respond to the requirements in a timely manner. IT infrastructure is a combination of multiple resources including software and hardware services needed to host IT workloads for efficient operation, management and deployment of IT environment in an organization. Managing such a strategic framework to define an organization’s success is quite challenging.
The outlook of an IT infrastructure
The uniqueness of an IT infrastructure lies in its capability to facilitate the life support network in an organization to ensure the smooth functioning of technological applications. Advancing towards a digitalized world, highly sophisticated technologies including robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and network communications continue to redefine the way businesses interact with each other. Building and managing an efficient framework provides the possibility to support the transition to next-gen technologies including the cloud.
Challenges faced by IT infrastructure
With information technology gaining more prominence with each passing day, new business processes and models are developed and built around emerging technologies. This emerging environment opens up a plethora of opportunities for individuals and businesses. In order to leverage such vast potential, organizations need to make sure that their IT infrastructure is well-equipped with technologies that enable them to identify and address the upcoming challenges.
Here are a few challenges to the future of IT infrastructure:
Security:
As data access is becoming easier, a problem arises wherein there are chances that it might be exploited by cyber-criminals and intruders. Eventually, security becomes a major concern for an organization which continues to increase its operations around the latest technologies including cloud computing. A proactive setup involving backup and recovery solutions as a part of an overall security protocol might keep an organization in a safe zone.
Data acquisition:
Organizations need access to high-performance computing resources with larger data sets and a means of collaborating with experts. The firewalls that protect web browsing, email and other applications cause packet loss in TCP/IP networks, eventually showing data speeds to the point where data collaboration becomes unviable. Moreover, routers and switches lacking high-speed memory to handle large bursts in traffic can lead to similar problems. A simplified and cost-effective structure with efficient software and commodity processors would redefine the data acquisition approaches in businesses.
Virtualization:
Moving forward, there are chances that modern infrastructure might comprise of high-end software-defined networking, which aims to make the network as flexible as virtual servers. Using compelling technologies such as virtualization requires a more dedicated security protocol. Unlike physical servers, virtual servers can easily be accessed and exploited. Securing a virtualization environment still stands as a major challenge to organizations, especially when it comes to information control, identity management and application access.
Computing platforms:
Another huge challenge faced by most organizations in their IT infrastructure is the massive amount of space and energy required to power supercomputers. However, this can be solved by exploiting multi-core platforms or new general-purpose graphical processors but the existing software must be optimized and redesigned to handle it.
Cloud computing:
Most businesses who are shifting towards cloud computing platforms in order to address their storage and computing tasks face a unique set of challenges. Businesses integrating cloud infrastructure with the existing IT infrastructure require staff with considerable software and hardware expertise as it needs to be constantly monitored for likely errors in hardware performance. Their further concerns also include performance, customization and security.
Network and connectivity:
Organizations require a reliable network to support its functionality on a daily basis. However, optimization of data transfer requires a new software-based approach to network architecture design. For instance, the ability to migrate public IP address allows application services to be moved to other hardware. Moreover, adding intelligence to both Wi-fi and wired networks might increase the possibility to optimize traffic delivery, improve service and reduce costs.
Mobile devices:
The extensive use of mobile devices not only poses a major challenge but also threatens an organization’s IT infrastructure. The concepts such as “bring your own device”, which is used to empower workload and increase productivity ends up as an additional burden on the infrastructure. However, future concepts demand solutions to deal with the methods employees access company data. An enterprise’s IT infrastructure needs to adapt to new challenges including the ability to accommodate more clients demanding access, high network capabilities, a huge volume of data and computing speed.